From reading several friends lately, I've tried to figure out just what still makes me angry about injustice and inequality. I started to write about Feminism and ended up going down a longer, wider highway of thought.
We spoke of recent history, of changes, and of trying to Make Things Equal without seeing it as a loss of power. How easily I could then see the connection between Domestic Power to Political Power.
Those Summer of Love sitcom 60s, hippies, and the gentle ways of domesticity? What a freakin' one-sided view. It was also raw, violent, a time of such upheaval that nothing would ever be the same again, and dammit it needed to change. An entire nation had to see change in a violent way to realize that not only women could no longer be held back, but it could no longer hold race as a reason to enslave by exclusion either.
I am old enough to remember bra-burnings, marches, the DC riots, the draft, Roe v. Wade when it happened, even if I was too young to realize the impact and history behind it.
"May you live in interesting times" certainly applied here, and I don't see it as the curse it is meant to be in its originating culture. I see it as breath-taking and powerful in its frightening violence. We may have to once again take our nation by violent outrage in order to make changes that will empower all of us in equality. The big picture of what happened played itself out within our family during those times.
All I knew was that my mum always worked both outside and inside the home, did all the housework while dad mowed the lawn, fixed the car and the appliances and took care of the money. That ALL changed when he was sent to Vietnam twice in three years and she had to take care of herself AND a young daughter, moving across an ocean to arrange living accommodations, pay rent and purchase a car herself. The impact of her independence made for some major difficulties when dad came home from war and tried to take back his power in our small family. The big showdown came when she "went on strike" and refused to do ANY housework until dad and I learned to do for ourselves all the things she had done their entire marriage. No more sitcom dad and kid, if we ever really did resemble that sort of family. No, we didn't much, but such is life when it doesn't measure up to the social fantasy. I was a LatchKey Kid, and proud of having a key to the house, time to be alone, and freedom from my parents. (What did I do with my free time? I did my (very few) chores, homework and then read everything I could find on mum's bookshelves. Nothing I could pick up to read was censored in our house.) I also watched my parents' marriage run aground on the rocky shore of independence/equality, as they played out the adjustments they had to face. I did my young best to not take sides, but despite wanting to live with my dad, that was just unheard of, and so I became a child of a partial divorce, a marriage torn and bleeding, raw and aching, but patched with a band-aid and aspirin.
My parents did their best to share me, but that too, was an exercise in an equality that didn't exist. I hated the power I saw my mum wield over home, my dad and their marriage. I vowed to never become like her. But I missed the part where she had no power to make choices that may have been healthier for all of us.
Later in their marriage, after the three year separation and near-divorce, she told my dad "I cooked for the first 20 years, now it's YOUR turn". Amazingly, dad found out that he enjoyed cooking, grocery shopping, and getting praise for presenting food. But old habits run deep and re-insert themselves, and guess who still does the vacuum, dusting, cleaning, dishes, all the while complaining about it? Uh-huh.
And where are we in the Big Picture, out there in America? Still practicing an oppression of those who are different, the insidious habits of old have comfortably reestablished themselves in our nation. America has again gotten blood on its hands that won't wash away easily. Another generation of disenfranchised, bewildered and damaged veterans who can't depend on the same system that told them "go do this and we'll take care of you", another way of seeing the differences in people and treating them badly for their difference, another skewed perspective of The Good Old Days, only this time it's the 80s instead of the 50s. And again, popular culture seems to forget that those times bred the problems of today, that homelessness started when people who were different were no longer given the care they needed, when problems were ignored in our society until they surfaced in Middle Class America such as children killing each other and families no longer being able to afford basic housing.
Wake up, America, please wake up from your sleep and realize that the battle for equality is far from over and that we're sliding into separatism far more than we're practicing Liberty and Justice for ALL.
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